


Battle Scars

by afteriwake



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Body Image, Body Worship, Established Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper, F/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, Scars, Self Confidence Issues, Sherlock Holmes and Feelings, Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-05
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-30 03:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5148041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afteriwake/pseuds/afteriwake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has scars from too many battles fought, and as a result is not particularly fond of how he looks anymore. When he begins a relationship with Molly, he’s worried what it will mean when she inevitably gets close enough to have carnal knowledge of him. But she surprises him when she sees his scars with her words and her actions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battle Scars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thewinterspy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewinterspy/gifts).



> Wow! This is my 800th fic on AO3! I'm rather surprised by that. I wanted to make sure it was a Sherlolly fic and all the ones I had to write today on my checklist weren't Sherlolly so I looked through prompts I'd saved and found [this post](http://jinxga.tumblr.com/post/129449744561/consider-molly-seeing-sherlocks-scar-from-being) on Tumblr from the user **jinxga** that inspired me, stating " _consider: molly seeing sherlock’s scar from being shot, and quietly asking if there’s more. sherlock shows her what remains from the lashing he got just before he returned home. at first, she’s quiet for so long that he thinks she’s disgusted, but then she touches each mark carefully, followed by a soft kiss. in between it all, she tells him he’s the bravest person she knows, and how lucky she is to have him_." This just kind of poured out so I hope I did the post justice.

When he was young, he had been quite egotistical about his looks. Not to the point where he honed his physique with hours and hours of physical exercise, but he took pride in the way he looked. He was attractive, he knew it. He knew women, and men as well, found him to be appealing and they fancied him. Their eyes would linger over his physique and they would stare appreciatively and he knew he was being checked out. It gave his ego a boost.

That had been before Serbia, though.

Before Magnussen.

Before Mary.

The outside of him, when he was clothed, looked fine. He was still handsome to the world, and that was all the world cared about, it seemed. They wanted the pictures, they wanted the story of the brilliant consulting detective who could solve the unsolvable crimes. They didn’t care about the pain he’d been through, the physical and emotional pain. As long as he looked good on the cover of magazines and the front pages of newspapers, as long as his story sold, that was all that mattered to the world.

But he didn’t like looking in the mirror much anymore. When he looked in the mirror he was reminded of the battles he had fought, of all that he had gone though, of everything he had lost. He hated the reminders. The scar on his midsection from the bullet from Mary was always front and center, and on occasion he would see the remnants of the lashing he got before he came home in reflections. And there were other scars, smaller ones, from his fall, that had managed to heal more. But they were all reminders of things he would rather forget.

When he began a relationship with Molly he was hesitant to engage in physical intimacy with her. It wasn’t that he was afraid to be close or to touch her; no, he yearned to hold her close and to kiss her. But he knew that, eventually, they would become intimate in the most carnal sense, and she would see him stark naked and see all the scars, see every last blemish on his skin, see every last reminder of failures of his past. He wasn’t sure he could put himself through that.

Slowly, though, she would coax things out of them. Handholding during a walk in the garden here. A kiss in a darkened cinema there. Snuggling up next to him on the sofa one evening. A slow dance in the sitting room at Baker Street another. She let him ease into it, allowed him to become comfortable at his own pace, to give in to his own need to be close, until it got to the point where he freely pulled her close for a kiss in public, not giving a damn who was around, and was rewarded with a smile upon her lips as she eagerly kissed him back.

And as he had known, eventually, it got to a point where he knew they would fall into each other’s arms, where they would end the evening in bed together, taking pleasure in each other carnally. He was nervous, far more nervous than he ever should have been. And she noticed, reaching up to caress his cheek gently. “We don’t have to,” she said quietly. “I mean, we can just sleep next to each other.”

He shook his head. “I would…prefer if the lights were off,” he said.

“Oh, she said quietly. She pulled away from him and went to her door, turning off the switch and plunging the room into near darkness, the only light coming into the room being the light from the window. She went back to the bed. “Better?” she asked.

He nodded, and he leaned forward to capture her mouth with his. He would explain later why he needed the lights off, that it had nothing to do with her, that it had everything to do with him, but he felt her hand move to his chest and her fingers begin to undo the buttons on his shirt and he moved his hands to her thighs and slid them up along the silky smoothness of her stockings and soon other things were on his mind, vastly more important things, like making sure she was pleased, making sure she was pleasured, making her not regret the turn of events that led her to allow him into her bed that evening. When it was over he gathered her close, haphazardly arranging them under the quilt and drifting off to sleep, not bothering to clean themselves up. It could keep until morning.

He hadn’t expected to sleep so soundly, so well. He woke up to morning light shining in the window, the quilt somewhere down along his hips, and Molly propped up on her side, gazing down at him, her fingers lightly running up and down his chest and abdomen, occasionally running across the scar from the bullet hole. It took him a moment to realize she’d gaze the length of him and then focus on the scar. “That’s where she shot me,” he said quietly, part of him wanting to pull the blanket up and part of him feeling quite curious as to what Molly would do next.

“Do you have more scars?” she asked quietly, moving her gaze up to his eyes, a look of curiosity in her eyes. He hesitated a moment and then nodded, rolling over onto his stomach. He knew where each scar was. They were no longer red and raw; they hadn’t been for quite some time, but they were still raised. He waited for Molly to say something but she remained quiet, and he felt his heart begin to hurt. _She must feel as disgusted by them as I am,_ he thought to himself. 

Suddenly he felt a feather light touch on one of them, as Molly’s finger tip traced it. He shut his eyes at that. “They don’t disgust you?” he asked.

Her fingertip went away, to be replaced by the press of her lips and the barest brush of her bare breasts against his back. “You got these in Serbia?” she asked, pulling away to trace another scar.

“Yes,” he said. “My brother didn’t reach me in quite enough time.”

“You were quite brave, then,” she said, pressing a kiss near that scar when she was done. “You’ve always been one of the bravest men I ever knew, if not the bravest. And that is one of the things I love most about you, Sherlock. I’m quite lucky to have you in my life.”

He felt something ease inside of him as she continued to trace the scars and press a kiss to each of them on his back when she was done. When she got to the last scar he sat up and reached for her, pulling her in for a passionate kiss. However much he might hate himself, however much he might loathe the sight of himself sometimes, she loved him, and that meant far more to him than she would ever know. That might be enough to help him learn to love himself, and that would be the most wonderful thing anyone would ever have done for him, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to make sure he paid her back for such a priceless gift by loving her as much as she loved him.


End file.
